I’ve not mentioned it before because I thought nobody would take me seriously. I thought I’d just be labelled as “some pretentious kid who doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. Just like Michael Martin, I aired on the side of caution as it just seemed like a better idea not to mention it.

It’s only in the last month or so I’ve started telling more and more people, largely down to Alex Fraiser‘s persuasion skills After seeking out lots of advice, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of readers wouldn’t have a problem and would “appreciate the honesty”, to quote Leland.

In the last year I’ve met and worked with some awesome people and slowly I started telling some of the awesome people my age and the usual response was “oh that’s cool. What were you saying about the options panel?” It’s this sort of reaction that made me realise I could probably tell everyone, so now I am.

Here’s the obligatory awkward headshot, again, inspired by Alex Fraiser.

What follows are a series of PFAQs (potentially frequently asked questions). If you’ve got any yourself, do ask.

Shouldn’t you be at school?

Yes, I am. Quite a good one too.

How do you balance your time?

I don’t have nearly enough time. Obviously stuff comes first, which doesn’t leave much time for interwebs stuff. Annoyingly, this means there’ll be the odd fortnight when you won’t see anything from me appear here.

So how did it all start?

Well, it was around November, 2007. Along with a couple of friends, I wanted to start reviewing video games. I installed myself as “the tech guy” and so set up this blog, using this “WordPress” thing. I had no idea how to use it and I stretched my abilities by… changing the colour of the header to green! This was Kubrick, so there was a colour picker, but that’s irrelevant.

I had no idea really how to use WordPress or how to change the design, so I promptly gave up on it.

Thankfully, I returned in March the next year. Without even realising it, I’d recognised that I needed a good CMS and that WordPress was the best option (I remember trying out all the other blogging platforms in Fantastico as well as Joomla and Drupal, deciding that Joomla and Drupal were too complicated and WordPress was the best option because of the community!), even then.

As a result, the WordPress powered Nometet.com was born and still lives to this day.

Meet your new friend, WordPress

That summer I hacked together my first WordPress theme and came across this website called HackWordPress.com (now WPHacks). I was amazed by the wealth of material available and in a masterstroke, introduced into the world of blogging.

In the next couple of months I saw, and was fascinated by how Jean-Baptiste Jung was able to launch a blog and find a readership so quickly, bouncing off the success of WordPressHacks. At this point I was still fairly new to WordPress, but this didn’t stop me getting stuck into blogging and late 2008, I had my first post published, on Jean’s blog, CatsWhoCode.

The post was called “Make Full Use of WordPress [lowercase p ] with the_excerpt_reloaded“. It was absolutely horrendous, and, in retrospect and I really had no idea what I was talking about. But that didn’t matter. Real people had actually read my post! Wow!

I published a couple more CatsWhoCode tutorials in early 2009, but in April launched Nometech, a spin off from Nometet. It was meant to be about web development, in a similar vain to CatsWhoCode, but it quickly became clear that the main focus was going to be WordPress and so in the summer changed the name of the site to WPShout.

Even at this point, I wasn’t great with WordPress. It was only over the summer I started to become more knowledgeable about WordPress and could really write with any authority about it. After this, WPShout sprang into life and by November, writing came up to the standard you read today.

It was also around that time I started work, along with Alex Cragg, on WPShift, a project we thought would revolutionise WordPress themes. We were wrong, but the concept remains a solid one and we’ll be back with that. Even as I write this, I’m working on an awesome backbone to all future themes :)

Into 2010, early on I decided I wanted to take WPShout to the next level and so approached Smashing Magazine about writing for them. My article idea was accepted and so I wrote and wrote, adding bits, taking out bits until the guys there were happy with my submission. The whole process took a good few months but was well worth it in the end

Onto now. I’m currently freelancing, as you may know and looking forward to continuing to make lovely content for you all to read.

If you’ve got any questions, do ask. I’d be very happy to answer.

“
Alex always exceeded [my] expectations… Working with Alex has been my pleasure.
— Herb Firestone
”

Excuse the slightly odd post here today (normal service will be resumed, I promise!), but today I’ve got an exciting announcement: I’m going freelance; for the next month I’ll be building websites full time.

And I’d like to design your website for you. Blogs, magazines, CMS style sites; they’re all within my field of expertise: WordPress.

If you (hop out of your RSS reader to see this) look to your right, you’ll see a couple of my recent projects where I’ve designed from scratch. Most of the work I’ve done of late has been optimisation or converting to WordPress, but I’m perfectly happy designing too.

If you click on the image you’ll get taken to an even bigger image version; links to sites, where available, are provided, although the images will show you what the sites looked like when I finished them (some have since been edited by their owners).

I’d really love to hear from you if you’ve got any queries or even just want to hear what I think I can do for your site, so if you’ve got a design you want turned into a WordPress theme, a WordPress theme you want improved or just simply want a wonderful design, drop me an email alex (at) alexdenning.com, I’ll get back to you, and we’ll take it from there.

And finally, thanks to everyone on Twitter for your support, it’s much appreciated

Why the low price?

We want to compete with ThemeForest. Simple as that. Whilst ThemeForest’s themes suffer from the problem of designers developing, themes on there have been selling really well and we wanted to put ShiftNews at a price where we can compete with the wealth of ThemeForest themes available.

$29.95 was the price we decided on. You don’t lose out on features either; you still get the fully functional ShiftNews, the widget powered homepage, the massive documentation and of course the free updates.

So what’s the catch?

As much as we’d like to be able to offer it, with the $29.95 “Basic” package you don’t get our customisation support, but you do still get the technical support.

Let me explain what that means: if you install the theme on your PHP5, WordPress 2.9+ install and then find that, say, the comments don’t work, we’ll help you out. If you install the theme on your PHP5, WordPress 2.9+ install and want the colour of the comments changed, we won’t help out. Essentially, if the theme’s at fault, we’ll step in.

Get it now!

Don’t wait, get ShiftNews now for $29.95! Of course, we still offer ShiftNews with the standard and developers licenses if you’d like to get support from myself.

Find out more about ShiftNews

Any questions, do ask in a comment.

Get Rich Quick

Inevitably there are some how want to piggy back on the success of the premium theme market. This, again inevitably, means that some people get a bad deal when buying themes as they don’t know any better. This allows people to label small theme makers as “not to be trusted”, claiming they should only buy from any of a select number of “trusted” names.

It may just be a coincidence, but I’ve often found it’s the “trusted” people making these claims and whether they mean to or not it’s an incredibly clever way of ensuring their position at the top of the market is unchallenged. I don’t think having someone “everyone” has heard of behind the theme company should be a test for whether they’re any good or not. Whether the themes work well should be the test, surely?

Positive Competition

Or is it? The nature of the competition means if someone does something it’s incredibly easy for everyone else to copy it. And so they do. Perhaps without thinking whether it’s a good idea to include that function in their themes.

Affiliate Heaven

Premium themes have brought a new kind of menace to the WordPress community: the list post filled with ”100 Best Premium WordPress Themes“. Posts filled with affiliate links and screens of themes that, frankly, are a little bit rubbish. I’m looking at ThemeForest (the irony!) especially where designers trying to develop often leads to poor results and copying.

On the flip side though, they allow bloggers to share in the success of premium themes, earning a little extra income from supporting something that they (hopefully) genuinely believe is a good product. Some folks are even kind enough to buy advertising on sites like mine, something I and I’m sure others are very grateful for.

Dependency on WordPress

It’s obvious, but premium WordPress themes are dependant on WordPress and the continued success of WordPress. Woo have been the first to branch out into ExpressionEngine and then Tumblr, something I expect others will be doing too.

At the moment though, it’s in everyone’s best interests that WordPress continues to grow and it’s going to be interesting to see how all parties contribute. At this point it’s customary to cite what Woo did with the custom navigation. Trouble is there’s a limit to how many times something like that can be replicated as otherwise we’ll all upgrade one day to find colour pickers and widgets everywhere, something that’s not necessarily a good thing!

It’s all… shiny

Originally themes were designs. Then they became designs with functions stuck on. As I said earlier, because someone did it, everyone else copied. This has led to themes becoming not-quite-as-nice-to-look-at although recently there’s been a shift back to looking good instead of just functioning well. Personally, I think that whilst a theme can function awesomely, it’s not something that all themes need to do or even should do; fundamentally they’re designs and thus that should be the primary function of the theme — to look good.

Acceptance

They’re here to stay, I think everyone needs to realise that very quickly. Personally, I see no reason why there shouldn’t be some option for themes to be installed directly from the admin panel, but that’s something to argue about another day. Do let me know I’m wrong.

Which is a problem for people like me. It takes a good couple of hours to write a WPShout post so I’d like to think it’s appreciated. Turns out I’m wrong; in this post we’ll find out how.

Competition?! You didn’t tell me!

I recently ran a competition on WPShout. No, not that one with the twenty or so premium themes up for grabs, but another, discreet one. It was in my post about backing up WordPress; I didn’t make a big thing of it on purpose as I wanted to make sure that only actual readers entered, not people who’ll come to the site, enter the competition and never come back. I thought if I made a mention of the competition in the opening paragraph then most readers would take a look.

I was wrong, again.

I find that astounding; you can usually expect 1% of people who view a page to leave a comment and usually these are the people who’ve read the article thoroughly and then have something to say. So it was a bit of a surprise to see that less than half of all commenters had read the whole article (although I’m assuming people who commented but didn’t enter didn’t see the bit about the competition).

You might read this bit

So then, if you can’t change a habit (of not reading), what can you do?

Subheadings. They’re great for breaking up bits of text into readable chunks.

You can also use really short paragraphs.

Or bold, that works too.

Recently on Shout I’ve been trying to halt people scanning by using “alert” boxes, like the one just above. In these I can summarise the main points I’ve just made so if people don’t want to read the whole thing, they don’t have to. Importantly, they halt people scanning. If something’s bright yellow, you’ll give it a second glance.

A good readable font at a decent size is a must, too.

Built into WordPress

Thankfully, all of the things I’ve discussed are really easy to do with WordPress. Obviously with the WYSIWYG post editor you’ve got bold, italics, subheadings (you’ll want “Heading 2″ or “Heading 3″ from the dropdown that has “Paragraph” by default).

These alert boxes are a little more tricky though. Only a little, mind you. You could just go into HTML view and type <div class="alert"> and </div> around the bit you want to highlight, but that’s a bit of a pain; I’m using the post editor buttons plugin so I just have to click a button and it gets added for me. As far as I’m aware you can’t just add it to the dropdown, but I’d love to hear if anyone knows how.

The alternative

There is an alternative that almost guarantees people read the whole of a post: an awesome art directed post. Jad does them beautifully and I’ve no doubt that they make people stop and read for more than anything I’ve mentioned here. The only caveat is that they take an age to do!

So there we are. Quite a short post. Hopefully you’ve read it and now have bit of a better of an understanding of how to just break up posts a bit to make them easier to read.

It’s all about custom fields. Specifically, Extending WordPress With Custom Fields, a great little topic. In the post I go through just about everything I can think of that’s awesome to do with custom fields. One of the topics, setting a different background with each post is something I’ll expand on here on Shout at a later date.

It was certainly an interesting experience writing for Smashing Magazine. To give you an idea how vigorous they are with their posts, I did the first draft of this post back in January. Since then I’ve had to expand the post twice although they didn’t find any flaws in my code

I did warn this was a quick note. Do take a look at it and let me know what you think.

Backing up WordPress manually

I’ll start with a warning: backing up your blog manually probably isn’t a good idea. You’ll forget. Your computer will self implode. Aliens will attack. The general jist of it is that you’ll forget to make that all important backup. And that’d be bad. But say you’ve just made a client site and want to just make a quick backup. In that case, manually might be the best way.

Option 1: export posts, download theme

It’s really easy to export your posts, pages, custom fields, comments etc: under ‘Tools’ click ‘Export’ and then download the export file. That’s all your posts done.

The next bit is literally what it sounds like: login to your FTP and just download the theme, zip it up and name it something sensible like WPShout theme backup 01-01-1999.

Option 2: MySQL export through phpMyAdmin

If you’ve got plugins and the like too then you’ll want to export your database through phpMyAdmin.

Login to phpMyAdmin, select your database and click the ‘Export’ tab. Next you’ll need to export your database as shown below:

And that’s all there is too it. Simple enough, but a pain to do repeatedly. As always, some pros and cons of backing up manually:

The free plugin

I’d always used WordPress Database Backup for backing up my site, getting it to send an email every 24 hours with the database of my site.

It literally just backs up your database and nothing else, so you’ll need to have separate backups of your theme and plugins (and even uploads too).

It’s not fair to criticise it though, it doesn’t claim to do anything else and does backup the database well, giving you quite a few options:

Yeah, you might as well use it.

The paid plugin

Plugin Buddy recently burst on the scene, from the guys behind iThemes. They’ve been very successful so far and after trying out BackupBuddy I can see why (I’m using no affiliate links here — I genuinely think it’s great). Here’s a little video:

Obviously it does other things too, but strictly from a backup point of view it’s good. It does the database plus your theme, plugins and even widgets too which is handy. You can set backups to email or upload to an FTP although the email option makes more sense as chances are you’ll need the backup because you can’t get onto your host or something like that.

I’ll say no more about BackupBuddy — I certainly think it’s the best option here and for $25 it’s good value (and although they’ll try and sell it to you like you can’t use it on more than one site at a time, there’s nothing to stop you using BackupBuddy on as many sites as you like as it’s licensed under the GPL).

Cory Miller has kindly offered five copies of BackupBuddy to WPShout readers — to enter you’ll have to leave a comment and briefly outline a post you’d like to see on WPShout in the future. Suggestions like “um, a tutorial…” or useless suggestions (at my discretion) won’t count. Something like “an in depth look at all the different backup plugins available” would be an excellent suggestion.

The Automattic option

Soon you’ll be able to use VaultPress too — the Automattic option. At the time of writing, all I know is that it backs up everything for an unspecified monthly fee. If it’s priced right, it’ll be a brilliant option although even if it’s $10/month, that’s still what most people pay for their hosting so it’s unlikely they’d shell out that again for a backup.

Go and backup!

It’s always the case with these things. You only do one after it’s too late and you’ve lost everything, at which point you’ll think must backup and then do it twice and never again. Backing up is so important and as this post has showed, relatively easy to do too, so go and do it! Go on, off! You’ll thank me one day.

First off, it’s wider. Massively wider, filling up a 1280 screen, something that over 90% of readers have — I decided that as the overwhelming majority have screens with large (normal?) resolutions it was worth it as I’d be able to fit more stuff in the sidebar and have a wider content area, always good for putting lots of code in

Next up is that the site now sports a number of CSS3 gradients in the — one for the header background and the second as the content background. That does mean the site loads without a single image used for backgrounds. For the three visitors who use IE, you get a solid colour throughout the whole background which looks fine. I think it’s a fairly good example of progressive enhancement and all that jazz.

The increased width of the design does mean that there is a new ad spot open in the header so if you want to promote your product to a great audience then check out the BSA page.

The sidebar is now sporting a fancy do-dah tabbed area where you can find a number of different articles in a number of different.. yeah, just take a look. Also in the sidebar are some handy links to various bits of the site and subscription options.

You might have noticed the ‘Free Themes’ section of the navbar too. That’s where I’m going to be releasing a number of really simple but quite nice themes (and getting rid of the horrible ones there at the moment!) in the new WPShout “Theme House”. I’ve got two lined up at the moment which I’ll be releasing over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve had a couple of people ask if the new design is based on a Woo theme. Simple answer is yeah, I did take one of their themes as a starting point. Long answer is that I took one of their themes, completely stripped it down and rebuilt more or less the entire backend of it, using some pretty cool functions I’ll be sharing over the next couple of weeks. If I’m honest, I was pretty surprised how bad it was! The optimisation for both load times and search engines was poor to say the least with no sprites or the like and using a zillion background images and divs to achieve the overall effect of the theme.

I’ve also split content up into more sensible and smaller categories, as you’ll see in the navbar — the two categories I had before were a bit pointless and hopefully it’ll now be easier to find the content you’re after.

So there we are. New design. What do you think?

I like to do a competition every couple of months, but I’ve never done one on this scale before. Normally I’ll ask for some feedback on how you think WPShout has been going, but this time I’m going to make the feedback optional — I’d really appreciate your thoughts on how WPShout has been the past couple of months; you can leave it in the comments.

Introducing @WPShout

Up until now if you’ve wanted to follow WPShout on Twitter you’ve had to follow me and put up with all the junk I tweet. No longer! As of about an hour ago @WPShout is aggregating news from the WordPress community. If you’d like to have your blog added then @ me and I’ll sort it out.

A new design, too

The third incarnation of WPShout is nearly done too — I hope to have it live at the end of this week. It’s a pretty massive design, making full use of a 1280px screen, something that 90% of readers have. More on that later though.

A brief yearly review

Technically this is WPShout‘s first birthday — a year and a week ago today, Nometech.com, the precursor to this site launched. It was meant to focus on web development but very quickly it became clear that I was writing about WordPress the whole time and so three months in I moved Nometech to WPShout.

I’m delighted to say I’ve broken my target of 1000 RSS readers in a year. The next target will be 2000 RSS readers and Twitter followers on the @WPShout account, hence the announcement of the account now.

Show me the prizes!

Let’s face it, you didn’t read that, did you. You just want to win some prizes.

A massive thank you to the eight lovely people who’ve offered their themes here. Unless specified, you can take your pick of all of the themes the site has available. Prizes are as follows (sorry about the images!):

WPZoom 3 themes

WPShift 1 theme

ProThemeDesign 1 theme

StudioPress 3 themes

Elegant Themes 2 memberships

Viva Themes 3 themes

Gabfire Themes 5 themes

iThemes 1 copy of Builder

How to enter

Entering is very simple. You’ve got to a) subscribe by RSS and b) follow @WPShout on Twitter.

The closing date is this Friday the 16th April at midnight BST. As stated below, winners won’t be emailed; I’ll announce winners on Saturday morning, some on Twitter and some by RSS, so make sure you keep following the site for updates.

Rules

Only one entry per person. Winners will be randomly selected from @WPShout followers. Some winners will be announced on Twitter and some by a special post that only goes to RSS readers. Winners will be announced, but not notified otherwise. This is my ingenious initiative to ensure that WPShout readers win the prizes. You have seven days to claim your prize. After that it will be redrawn.

Good luck!

I spent a good couple of hours whilst on the train listening to the WPTavern podcast last Sunday. You should too.

I could stop there, but I’ll go on.

The podcast was discussing commercial themes where Jeff and guest co-host Jacob Goldman were  joined by Jason Schuller, Brian Gardner, Cory Miller and even briefly Matt Mullenweg joined in!

It was a very interesting discussion and something which stuck out for me was how Cory and Brian especially had more or less launched their own theming careers off creating and learning from free, themes. They’re not dead after all then

It was also good to hear Brian, Jason, Cory and Matt all agreeing that they all stood to benefit from helping each other out for the common good of making WordPress better and easier to use.

The podcast is a good couple of hours long, but do try and listen to it, even if it’s a bit at a time; it was a valuable experience for me and I’d hope you’ll find the same.

WordPress Weekly, episode 94 “Commercial Themes” is available in iTunes, in MP3 format and of course also on the Tavern itself. Good work Jeff!